Condoms and Conundrums

In this week’s issue, Jill Lepore writes about sex-education books for children and teen-agers. In the piece, she describes her own difficulties in discussing the birds and the bees with her father when she was a child, and with her children as an adult:

It was in the kitchen. I was reading the newspaper. A small, bookish boy sat by my side.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Do you need a conundrum for oral sex?”

I put down my newspaper and sighed. And then, carrying on an ancient and honorable family tradition, I whiffed the bejesus out of that one.

The subject is so fraught that even the euphemisms commonly employed to make the discussion, um, palatable are freighted with innuendo, as Anthony Lane found in 1994, when he reviewed the National Health and Social Life Survey and other recent publications on Americans’ sexual behavior. Here he considers the distance between the clinical language of the social scientists and the topic at hand:

I love it when these guys talk dirty. Their well-intentioned grab at a dry word like “terminate” goes terribly wrong, ruined by overtones of Amtrak and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and bears them still further away from the moist joys of their subject; as that distance increases, so the whole book asserts its claim to be one of the comic masterpieces of our age, its command of tone as flawless as that of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”—or, as we should now call it, “College-Educated Male Members of Median Birth Cohorts Express an Eighty Per Cent Preference for Penetrative Sex with Type II Protestant White Female Partners, Thereby Inheriting an Above-Average Risk of Sexually Transmitted Infection.” A major player in these books, “cohort” seems to be the beefy, official word for a statistical grouping—as in “over half those formed in the youngest cohort are cohabitational unions”—but after five hundred pages I was still taken aback by its appearance, imagining phalanxes of Roman legionaries in fancy breastplates laying waste the singles scene. The most touching moments in “The Social Organization of Sexuality” come when the authors hear a small voice that cries to them from their own bareassed, backseat past, and try to find room for it in their brave new world: “Of course, not all adolescents complete the entire program or, to use the especially apt euphemism, ‘go all the way.’ ” Only those with the courage of their conventions can place their trust in a phrase like “complete the entire program,” which makes teen-agers sound like washing machines.

By coincidence, the most comprehensive survey of American sexual behavior published since 1994 was recently released by Indiana University. It features this graph on conundrum use.

The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.